Lakeland sees improved dairy market conditions in 2016
That’s the view of chief executive Michael Hanley in his Christmas and New Year message to milk producers.
He said Lakeland Dairies has continued to put in the groundwork required to ensure long-term sustainability and continuing growth and development in an increasingly globalised and often volatile dairy marketplace.
“The major dairy importers and traders across every continent have taken advantage of lower prices to increase their stock of dairy products over the past year and this will take some time to wash through the system,” he said.
He said in spite of market volatility, Lakeland is making strong progress overall. It has 170 products which go to 77 countries worldwide.
“Our foodservice division makes over 100,000 tonnes of dairy products and 700 million individual product units each year,” he said.
“In the food ingredients sector, we supply hundreds of major food industry customers with ingredients and the world’s top infant nutrition companies with the highest quality milk powders.”
He said Lakeland will be the second largest dairy processing co-op on the island of Ireland in 2016, with a milk pool of over 1.1 billion litres.
“Indicatively, that level of milk throughput will yield 160,000 tonnes of powders a year and over 30,000 tonnes of butter, in addition to our dairy foodservice output,” he said.
Lakeland is intent on delivering value to its milk producers with as high a milk price that it can possibly pay, in line with market conditions.
